contact

no plan survives contact with the enemy

Military plans always need to be changed once they are enacted in real-life military situations. The saying emphasizes the need for flexibility, as opposed to strict adherence to strategy. It is attributed to Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, a 19th-century Prussian field marshal. Men, be ready to make changes on the battlefield—we all know that no plan survives contact with the enemy.

bring someone or something into contact with someone or something

to cause things or people to touch or associate with one another. She hasn't been the same since I brought her into contact with the child who had chicken pox.Don't bring your hand in contact with the poison ivy.Don't bring him into contact with Fred.

*contact with someone a link to someone

in contact (with someone or something)

communicating with someone or a group; to share information with someone or a group. I have been in contact with our supplier, who will deliver the part next week.I am in contact with the Senate committee now.

lose contact with someone or something

and lose touch with someone or something

[for communication with someone or a group] to fail or fade away; to let one's friendship or relationship with someone or a group lapse. I hope I don't lose contact with you.I don't want to lose touch with my old friends.

As I now recall the scene of my first year, I do not believe that one often has the opportunity of coming into contact with three or four hundred men and women who were so tremendously in earnest as these men and women were.

Dealing with the beginnings of imagination in the minds of children, they record, with the reality which a very delicate touch preserves from anything lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries of childhood over which some writers have been apt to gloat, but the contact of childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart.

He cannot see Numa, his enemy, go hungry, because Tarzan's heart is turning to water by contact with the soft, weak creatures of civilization.

Here the short stakes were set at intervals of about a foot around the walls near the top, their sharpened points inclining downward so that the lion had fallen unhurt into the trap but could not leap out because each time he essayed it his head came in contact with the sharp end of a stake above him.

For the sake of convenience I have myself given names to the various Folk I was more closely in contact with, and the "Chatterer" is the most fitting description I can find for that precious stepfather of mine.

I had lost some hair and hide, here and there; the sharp and jagged end of a broken branch had thrust fully an inch into my forearm; and my right hip, which had borne the brunt of my contact with the ground, was aching intolerably.

The font was of stone worn smooth by long-continued use, the four outer edges hollowed and polished by the contact of the countless Wieroo bodies that had leaned against them for how long a period of time Bradley could not even guess.

Real character, he holds, the chief proper object of man's effort, is formed by quietly living, as did he and the dalesmen around him, in contact with Nature and communion with God rather than by participation in the feverish and sensational struggles of the great world.

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